Learning WordPress: Is It Better to Self-Teach or Do an Online Course?

Are you considering learning how to use WordPress, the most popular Content Management System in use today? Do you long to spread your message to the online world? Are you ready to see your name in (web-based) lights?

If you’re keen to learn, choosing the best teaching system for you will save a lot of heartache. If you have never used WordPress before you will be amazed by the never-ending possibilities that will be available to you from day one. Knowing from the outset how you are going to learn about it could save your sanity!

Learning WordPress

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, recently announced that in the 12 months prior to July 2013 there was an average of 89 WordPress downloads per minute. With its popularity at an all-time high, it stands to reason that there are a near-infinite number of blogs and courses out there, all promising to make you an overnight WordPress whizz.

But here’s the thing: you can’t learn everything you need to know about WordPress overnight.

Most people could definitely get a blog up and running overnight. However, without prior knowledge of WordPress, you’ll be learning new tricks and tweaks for a very long time after your site is live. Throw in a desire to learn HTML and you’ve got a pretty steep learning curve ahead of you.

So, is it better to self-teach WordPress or should you do an online course?

To decide on the answer, let’s first look at the benefits and drawbacks of both options.

Benefits Of Teaching Yourself WordPress

You can learn WordPress for free. With enough searching you can find all the information online and it won’t cost you a cent. YouTube has thousands of videos explaining in detail how to do just about anything. The hosting companies all provide their own videos and help desks to get you set up. There are dozens and dozens of blogs which provide great information about how to do anything you could ever need to know. The WordPress.org site itself is a gold mine of great information.

You can pace yourself. As you need to learn something new you can look it up and implement it on your site.

You’ll have an amazing sense of accomplishment. Learning a new skill makes you feel great. Succeeding when you have taught yourself is particularly gratifying and will really appeal to some people.

Drawbacks Of Teaching Yourself WordPress

How will you know where to start? The old saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know” applies here. You’ll need to find your own starting point and this can take a tonne of time in online research and finding a source that you trust.

Teaching yourself WordPress takes loads of time. Granted, Google searches will turn up every single piece of information that you need to find to start your own website and maintain it. But the time you take to find this information will be overwhelming. Searching through online instructions and videos (that are sometimes out of date) takes time that you may not have.

If you’re not tech-savvy, you’ll probably find yourself confused a lot of the time. Anyone who is new to WordPress will find some tasks a little complicated, while complete first-timers will feel some tasks are completely beyond them. Someone logging into their hosting cPanel for the first time could definitely be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed and giving up straight away.

There’s no one to ask questions of. When you strike out on your own, you really are on your own. If you get stuck, there’s no one you can quickly contact to get an answer to your problem. You can always post in online forums to get an answer to your question. A quick read of the forums will show that some people find the answers as confusing as their original question!

Now let’s look at the benefits and drawbacks of an online WordPress course.

Benefits Of An Online WordPress Course

An online course will have an obvious start and end point. People who make money from teaching online courses spend time to work out everything you’ll need to learn and then they (hopefully) carefully plan it into a sensible layout. You’ll learn the right thing at the start, middle and end of the course.You’ll also have all the teaching materials stored in one place for you to refer to again and again.

You’ll have a fully functioning website at the end of the course. By the end of your course your site should be up and running, you’ll have plugins working, a theme that you love, links to social media set up and some content published. You might even have launched your site during the course and have an audience already reading your content and engaging with you.

A community is often a part of the course offering. Lots of courses offer extra perks like an exclusive Facebook community or a forum that you can only access with other class participants. This can be one of the greatest assets of an online course. Being able to see the questions that others need answers to can be a huge help to you as well as having the ability to ask your own questions. Sometimes your fellow classmates will become your greatest fans. They’ll be there when you want to launch a new product or promote a particularly important post. The benefits of this community will extend well past the end date of the course you choose.

Email support. So many people offer money-back guarantees these days that they want you to be 100% happy with their course. You can often email them to get quick answers when you have questions. And you will have questions!

Drawbacks Of An Online WordPress Course

Cost. For almost any great online WordPress course, you are going to have to put your hand in your pocket. There are free courses available – these will most likely be very, very basic. In many cases, these free courses are offered and then you can pay to upgrade to more advanced information.

Time commitment at the same time each week. Many courses are weekly at the same time each week. The time might be difficult for you to put aside as life suddenly gets in the way. A good course will have recorded modules or have you be able to work at your own speed.

As you can see there’s a lot to consider when deciding how best to learn WordPress.

An online course gives you the benefits of being fully planned out and offering a step-by-step schedule to get your website online. As long as you put in the work, you’ll finish with a fully operational site you can be proud of. You’ll usually get email support and a community of enthusiastic classmates to continue to converse with.

On the other hand, plenty of highly successful bloggers have learned from scratch without paying for penny, so it certainly can be done. It’s ultimately up to you!

What’s your experience with WordPress? Did you take a course (and if so, which one) or did you venture out on your own? If you had your time over would you self-teach or take an online WordPress course?

Tom Ewer

Tom Ewer is the founder of WordCandy.co. He has been a huge fan of WordPress since he first laid eyes on it, and has been writing educational and informative content for WordPress users since 2011. When he's not working, you're likely to find him outdoors somewhere – as far away from a screen as possible!

Grant Price

martin

Doing it online is certainly the better approach, because you can do it whenever you want. Disadvantage is, that most courses are rather to long / time taking but I found something new. This here is incredible fast, and very well structured. I guess it takes you 20 – 30 minutes, after that you get your side up and running http://jb-webs.com/wordpress/

tablokar

cloudypen

Learning wordpress seems to be easy for many when you consider that wordpress is all about publishing contetns. But to thirve as a blogger suing wordpress one need to learn a lot including backing up, customization, SEO etc. I think that new users can take advantages of online wordpress courses which provide support to each student.

Alex Cooper

Tom Ewer

Frank Stepanski

Great article.

I think there is no “best” way to learn WordPress. It depends on each person and how quickly you can learn new topics.

I teach WordPress and other technologies (mainly online) and everyone is different. Some are great at just researching links for information, some want a book to be told what topic to learn and in what order, some need one-on-one help, others are a mixture.

The best advice is to initially spend a few hours just ‘Googling’ the topic and getting an idea of what it is about. Then if you can, email or ask someone who knows the topic well for advise on where to go next in learning the basics, and if not, then subscribe to a video service like lynda.com just for a month to get at least an overview to help you get started.

Then you can decide if using online videos are the way to go, or finding an online course will be better. I teach at eClasses.org and most students get a good overview of specific skills and then they can do more learning on their own with their own projects.

WordCamps are great to get more information and network with people who are on the same level to gain knowledge or ask questions with the WP pros.

George Thiess

I am a small business owner who always seems to learn on my own. However, there is so much i do not know and I really dread having to be at the mercy of a web designer.

My company’s website is in WordPress and I think it is time that I start with the basics of WordPress and then follow with coding. It all gets so confusing when us small business owners start trying to improve our site and start seeing the CSS, php, HTML, Java script jargon being thrown around.

Kathleen

Hi Matt,
Your comments reflect mine, especially this one ” However, there is so much i do not know and I really dread having to be at the mercy of a web designer.” I am in this situation right now and need a super efficient way to learn basics and then go forward.

Matt

I have a friend wanting me to help him run and expand an existing website which was created with WP. I have very, very little experience. Would I be better off starting with online courses for wp and figuring out the rest as it comes or should I focus on other web developing courses first? Money is not a real issue if a particular course or site charges I just don’t want to waste my money from the start!

John Kerr

I learnt basic website development when the only tools available were HTML4/5 and Cascading Style Sheets (if you were lucky). That was damned hard work. After a long period of using rather than developing sites, I’m now coming back to revamp some of the old stuff that’s been festering for years. It’s quite a culture shock. Scrap and start again with WordPress is obviously the way to go, but the old habits die hard. Unless you have unlimited time for trial and error, I now think that a more disciplined formal learning process is the better route. Life is too short for messing about.

matts

Tom Ewer

Jana

Hi Tom, I take pride that I am actually a quick learner. I actually started with a personal blog, and most of the things I need to learn, I learned from forums and tutorial videos and articles. But if given the time, and the will to spend money for a class (lol) I would want to sign up for one to be able to learn more.

Bob Dunn

Hey Tom, great points and love the conversation. Not much I can add that’s not already been said.

But since I do WordPress training strictly for a living, I have heard it all. The exact reason there are so many options is directly related to all the learning styles out there. In fact, I did a presentation at WordCamp Portland on just “how to learn WordPress”.

Listening to people’s needs I have done them all from individual training, online classes, in-person classes, etc. You have the users, the power users and then people who want to learn design and development. A lot try the DIY at first, and depending on your comfort level of tech, this can be a do or die situation for anyone.

Foremost, I think everyone needs to know and understand their own limits. Once they do that, the road to learning will be a lot less bumpy…. cheers!

Tom Ewer

Greg

Some great points Tom. A lot of business owners are time poor but really want the ability to control their own website content and WordPress does a very good job of that.

I teach people how to learn WordPress while building their own website. This practical approach allows them to learn while doing and allows me to see what they are struggling with. Students love having control and the process gives them a much better understanding of what’s involved in a WordPress website build.

A lot of my students really want to learn on their own but they prefer to train with me because they don’t have to spend hours trying to work things out the ‘free’ way. The beauty of WordPress is that for those who do have the time, there are plenty of ways to learn.

Tom Ewer

Charlie Sasser

I like a little of both methods.

A few years back I learned Joomla by reading a great book and setting up a test site on a shared host and then a real site at work. Not bad for a sales and marketing guy but I will admit I am technical and have been around the internet since the days of Gopher.

What I find is after I’ve tried to figure something out on my own, I then like to follow-up with a live course because I have lots of questions and learn a lot of “best practices” I was unaware of doing it on my own. So in the case of Joomla, I took all of the courses from OSTraining in Atlanta from Steve Burge and learned lots.

Now that I’ve learned enough about WordPress to put up a few sites and even one for a friend’s small business, I’m ready to go to the next step. So…. I’m going to my first Word Camp in Raleigh, NC, in a few weeks and hope to learn better ways of using WordPress and learn more about “best practices”.

Tom Ewer

Noumaan Yaqoob

As for asking questions when self learning WordPress. WordPress support forums are a great place to start. At WPBeginner we also answer user questions related to the tutorials on our site. There are many other online communities like Stack Exchange, Quora, where users can ask questions. I personally got a lot of help and advise from the WordPress IRC chatroom.

Tom Ewer

Bob in New Hampshire

The answer is “yes”. I don’t mean to be flip, but depending on who you are and what style of learning you prefer, you could go either way.

Everyone is different. Some of us (me included) would have no patience for sitting in a classroom, or in a webinar (interesting that spell-check doesn’t like “webinar”). I’m a dive-right-in guy.

I’ve been in technology for 30-yrs but always in sales, marketing and product management, never engineering or development and once installed, I had my first website up and running in a half hour. Was it any good, or did it have great plug-ins and themes? Hell no. But, for me, doing and figuring it out is how I learn. Sure, I had to post on the WordPress forum for answers, but the community really helped me. So, put me down in the “I’ll figure it out myself” camp.

My wife? She would NEVER do it that way. She’d love to sit in a class or a webinar and learn from an instructor.

That’s why they offer both vanilla and chocolate, because people have different tastes.

I’ve been a professional ski instructor for forty years and we have a similar issue. It’s about evenly split when I ask this question to a client: “are you the kind of person who would prefer me to ski behind you and offer feedback, or for you to ski behind me and see what I’m doing?” Same point, people have different learning styles.

Tom Ewer

admin

This is great article. When I started learning WordPress back in 2006 there was no useful learning resources online or self-help books. I learned by trial and error. That took me very long time and it was frustrating. But today we have an abundance of learning resources be it free or pay. But the biggest challenges are: 1) How much time can you invest in teaching yourself to get to a point where you can comfortable design useful website? 2) If you are designing a website for your business, there are host of other tools and concepts (website planning, learning brainstorming to generate content, setup simple seo, learning specialized plugins, custom post types, Taxonomy etc) you might need to learn. In my live WordPress training program, 95% of students who take the courses have tried the online free course, videos and books before they decided to take the courses. Here are some of their common complaints:
1) Pre-recorded tutorials – “None is there to answer your questions when you are stuck
2) Time commitment – ” I have no patient to sit there and follow the video tutorial and apply on my own but instructor lead training forces me to commit time and effort
3) Open discussion – “During the training I can ask as many questions as possible and get responses real-time”
4) I have spent so many hours to learn WordPress on my own I finally gave up because I feel I still have long way to go to grasp the core concept.

As you can see WordPress “newbies” face a combination of different challenges. For those who already have technical background, following tutorials and applying them is easy but for general public it is not that easy.

What is your opinion/experiences about Live WordPress Training?
Thanks

Tom Ewer

Philo

After years of being a huge advocate of “learn by doing” I’ve finally backtracked and now suggest that any new software should be learned via some formal method. It doesn’t have to be an actual class, though those are great for many people. But there are also online tutorials, and plenty of books.

The problem with throwing yourself into it is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If you don’t understand “the way of” the program, you can end up very, very frustrated. Two WordPress examples:

– for beginning content creators, understanding the difference between posts and pages is pretty important. If you don’t “get” this when you’re creating your content, trying to create pages out of posts (or vice versa) creates many problems.

– for beginning programmers, understanding the loop or why you don’t edit core files will cause you much pain. But how do you learn that if you just start looking at files and editing things?

Step 1 should always be “understand the platform as taught by someone else.” Then move forward.

Tom Ewer

Philo

Tom, it’s beyond “inefficient” – I believe it’s actively harmful, both to the student and to their employer/customer.

How many times have you seen this:

Q: How can I write code to do [complex task]?

A: Why don’t you just use [library]?

Why? Because they didn’t know about it, because they “learned by forum” – took a programming task and solved it the way they’re used to, instead of understanding the new paradigm. Picture a procedural developer working with a database and looping through all the records to do something instead of just using using a SELECT query.

That’s why I insist that when learning a new platform, at least work through the 101-level stuff in an orderly manner.

leif

My experience has been sort of an ‘all of the above’ journey. I’ve mainly used Lynda.com to get my classroom lectures in and then logged into CodeAcademy or Mozilla’s MDN to go hands on. Installing a local server like WAMP/XAMPP to be able to play with and test WP/themes/plugins has also proven to be insightful. Beyond that, it’s mostly a matter of learning what I need to learn in order to solve a problem. For that, the resources can be overwhelming so I try to stick to the more authoritative sites like the codex or anything on dotorg. There are a staple of blogs I do hit up on a daily basis to stay on top of trends, and forums like StackOverflow are very useful now as I grow, but were daunting at first.

My advice to anyone starting fresh – bookmark a couple of programming glossaries that you can keep open while you browse and learn.